Chef Dale Talde initially had qualms about naming his first restaurant after

Chef Dale Talde initially had qualms about naming his first restaurant after his family name. As he tells Asian Journal’s Momar Visaya, “What if it sucks really bad and the restaurant is horrible or if it fails? You don’t want your last name to be a failure.” But after asking his parents about the idea, which came from his business partners, he went with it. And now, following the success of its Park Slope location, Asian-American restaurant Talde opened a few weeks ago in Jersey City, a fitting location for the chef, originally from Chicago and the son of first-generation Filipino immigrants.

Chef Talde, 36, is proud that around a quarter of the kitchen staff are Filipino. It’s a stark difference from when he started out.

“To me, it’s just as important. You’re teaching the young cooks. When I was starting in the kitchen, there was no Filipino in the kitchen, absolutely none. I was the only one and for them, I was not a Filipino, I was a Chino, a broad Asian stroke there. ‘He’s Asian so he must be Chinese’,” he quipped.
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“It’s our time now, the thirty-something Filipino Americans whose parents arrived here in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s when the healthcare boom came up. We are a product of this, and now, we are young professionals and we are making our mark, whether it’s music, arts, food, culture. It’s our time,” he said.

He does not make Filipino food, Chef Talde emphasizes, drawing the distinction between his parents who are Filipino and himself, a Filipino American.

I think most importantly, my voice through food is Fil-Am. Even people who were born in the Philippines would recognize it as Fil-Am. I don’t speak the language, I wasn’t born there but I grew up in a Filipino household eating Filipino culture, Filipino food all day long. I can only represent who I am, my voice as a Fil-Am.

When I went to school, it was pizza and tater tots. When I got home, it was kare-kare, sinigang, dinuguan. We ate that at home all day. It was a completely different culture outside the home. For me, that’s the viewpoint that I am taking. I’m a Filipino American and I’m going to put whatever that means to me on the plate. That’s how I push the culture through.

As for some of the dishes offered at Talde?

http://asianjournal.com/aj-magazines/fil-am-chef-dale-talde-on-mentorship-and-empire-building/
We’re doing things like kare-kare with Hong Kong noodles, Filipino barbecued pork cured in 7-Up, anatto seeds and black pepper. I’ve also called my mom for her recipes of pancit molo, pancit palabok and try to find my versions of that. We’ll probably roll out our version of sisig, a vegetarian version because our menus is pork-heavy right now.

“It’s not the easiest thing to tell your parents, to be okay that their child will become a laborer,” Chef Talde tells Momar. He elaborates in the full article found at Asian Journal. There, also read more from the chef about the restaurant itself, running a business, dreams of a Filipino noodle shop and find out how much of Talde’s clientele is Filipino, in the city that boasts the largest Filipino population in the state of New Jersey.